Excerpt from a Reader's Digest article
"One Teacher’s Brilliant Strategy to Stop Bullying"
Here's how one schoolteacher takes time each week to look out for the lonely.
Every Friday afternoon, she asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student who they believe has been an
exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her.
And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, she takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her, and studies them.
She looks for patterns.
Who is not getting requested by anyone else?
Who can’t think of anyone to
request?
Who never gets noticed enough
to be nominated?
Who had a million friends last week and none this week?
You see, Chase’s teacher is not looking for a new seating chart or “exceptional citizens.” Chase’s teacher is looking for lonely children. She’s looking for children who are struggling to connect with other children. She’s identifying the little ones who are falling through the cracks of the class’s social life. She is discovering whose gifts are going unnoticed
by their peers. And she’s pinning down—right away—who’s being bullied and who is doing the bullying.
As a teacher, parent, and lover of all children, I think this is the most brilliant Love Ninja strategy I have ever
encountered. It’s like taking an X-ray of a classroom to see
beneath the surface
of things and into the hearts of students.
It is like mining for gold—the gold being those children who need a little help, who need adults to step in and teach them how to make friends, how to ask others to play, how to
join a group, or how to share their gifts. And it’s a bully deterrent
because every teacher knows that bullying usually happens outside her eyeshot and that often kids being bullied are too intimidated to share. But, as she said, the truth comes out on those safe, private, little sheets
of paper.
As Chase’s teacher explained
this simple, ingenious idea, I stared at her with my mouth hanging open. “How long have you been using this system?” I said.
Ever since Columbine, she said. Every single Friday afternoon since Columbine. Good Lord.
This brilliant woman watched
Columbine knowing that all violence begins with disconnection. All outward violence begins as inner loneliness. She watched that tragedy knowing that children who aren’t being noticed may eventually resort to being noticed by any means necessary.
And so she decided to start fighting violence early and often in the world within her reach. What Chase’s teacher
is doing when she sits in her empty classroom studying those lists written with shaky 11-year-old hands is saving lives. I am convinced of it.
And what this mathematician
has learned while using this system is something she really already knew: that everything—even love, even
belonging—has a pattern to it. She finds the patterns, and through those lists she breaks the codes of disconnection. Then she gets lonely kids the help they need. It’s math to her. It’s math.
All is love—even math. Amazing.
Chase’s teacher retires this year. What a way to spend a life: looking for patterns of love and loneliness. Stepping in, every single day, and
altering the trajectory of our world.
http://www.rd.com/advice/parenting/stop-bullying-strategy/
Ret. 5-18-16
